This Right Here Is Buck 65

V2; 2005

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For Buck 65 (aka Rich Terfry, or Stinkin' Rich), career summary is a tall order-- he's made radical course corrections on virtually every one of his albums. This Right Here Is Buck 65 is his first V2 LP, and it's a ragged collection of new songs and drastically reworked tracks salvaged from his back catalog, apparently intended as both an introduction and an artistic synopsis. And though the album probably serves as an accurate snapshot of his headspace at one fixed point in time, the mercurial nature of Buck's talents have fated this to seem as yet another transitional work.

Though ostensibly still a hip-hop artist, the Nova Scotia-born Buck 65 continues to play fast and loose with genre orthodoxy, even by the lax standards of his erstwhile Anticon mates. An inveterate scavenger, Buck's continual search for musical origins has again led him down some unlikely cattle-trails to forge improbable links between hip-hop and rustic C&W;, Alan Lomax's folk field recordings, and Woody Guthrie's dust-bowl balladry.

Unabashedly courting comparison to Tom Waits, on This Right Here Buck has entirely abandoned the nasally, rapid-fire vocal delivery of his early albums, in favor of a mannered, scratchy gruffness which implies that he's aged roughly 55 years since 1999. This change is most obvious, and arguably most successful, on the remakes of such early tracks as "Pants on Fire" or "B. Sc." (otherwise known as "Bachelor of Science") where his newly weathered rasp imparts an air of world-weary authority to lines like "I'd rather read the Bible than use its pages to roll joints with."

Filled with shimmering waves of pedal steel and slide guitar, these spare, gritty reenactments will surely please fans of his 2003 urban-folk platter Talkin' Honky Blues, several tracks of which are included again here in unaltered form. Underground hip-hop enthusiasts, however, might be put off by Buck's near-complete disregard for the rippling, sample-laden funk of his youth, particularly on the cleaned-up version of his semi-classic "The Centaur". Played here in a stripped-down, acoustic arrangement (with one lyric cryptically changed from "my cock is so big and the end of it glistens" to "my clock is so clean and the hour-hand is missing,") the anarchic strangeness of the original is all but lost, while this new, dryly sophomoric edition might lead one to draw uncharitable comparisons to Buck's countrymen in the Barenaked Ladies.

But on the best tracks here, such as the coolly swaggering opener "Bandits" or his rambunctious cover of Guthrie's "Talking Fishing Blues", Buck 65 manages to connect his vivid junkyard hip-hop to deeply earthed roots that you'd never guess were there. At the risk of stretching the association beyond the breaking point, perhaps This Right Here can best be compared to such late-70s Tom Waits albums as Blue Valentine or Heartattack and Vine, where one hears an artist coming tantalizingly close to realizing his matured vision, renewing hopes that Buck 65 might someday deliver the hip-hop Swordfishtrombones he seems destined to create.